Busted S1E2 Recap: Treasure Island

In this episode: The cast meets the mysterious K and the final member of their group, officially forming the team of amateur detectives. They then head to Jeju Island on their very first case, which involves traveling all over the island looking for hidden treasure. However, things take a mysterious turn when a body is discovered during the search. And who are the mysterious people who suddenly join their treasure hunt?

Episode 2 Guest Stars

(I apologize for the not-necessarily-flattering quality of these photos – I mostly work with GIFs, so it’s a little harder to screenshot good images than I thought. But the aim is really just to give names to faces here.)

An Important Note

I’ve tried my best to summarize everything in these recaps, but sometimes there are parts of an episode or the overall story that aren’t clear to me. I’m in Korea, so I have Korean Netflix – they have English subtitles for all the dialogue, but not necessarily all of the captions and titles they put in the show. I’m sure that sometimes I miss things, and sometimes I may arrive at the wrong conclusion. But I’ll make sure to highlight the parts where I’m confused or not certain about certain details.

***WARNING!*** THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE EPISODE/SERIES AHEAD. These recaps are written summary style – I’m writing as if I’ve watched these episodes for the first time, but this is primarily aimed towards people who have seen the series before and want to refresh their memory or find answers to certain questions. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE SERIES AND ARE PLANNING TO, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!

Episode Recap

The team meets up at one of K’s safe houses, where they meet the final detective Sejeong. She plays them a recording of K (Ahn Naesang), their boss who brought them together. He confirms that Project D was an experiment that inserted detective DNA into each member of the team, and says that it “aims to eradicate all social evils.” Like C mentioned, there was an error where the team started to lose their memories. Although K initially planned to abandon the project, he observed the detectives and discovered the microchips were still affecting them. So, he planned to test them through M (and possibly C)… except Yoo Yeonseok stole Sejeong’s invitation, infiltrated the group, and murdered both of his assistants. Yet despite his plans resulting in tragedy, he wanted to move forward with formally creating the detective team. So now, it’s official!

We then shift to Jeju Island and a scene focusing on Minyoung. As she muses to herself, she passes a woman on the phone wondering where her boyfriend is. It seems like a random and unremarkable moment, but this is an important detail to remember for Episode 3. She then a has K-drama style encounter with a handsome young man – but when she tries to get his phone number, she’s interrupted by a call. It’s K, who asks her to gather the team in Jeju to go on a treasure hunt. And while she’s talking on the phone, the man mysteriously vanishes.

This episode’s client is museum director Woo Hyun. He welcomes the team and explains the case over tea. Woo Hyun had a very good friend who really loved Jeju Island, calling it the “Treasure of Korea.” This friend was also incredibly wealthy, and he hid treasures all over the island. When the man died, his will requested that Woo Hyun hold treasure hunts every year. He has done so several times, but no one has found the treasure yet. The only clue Woo Hyun has is a verse of a poem his friend wrote about Jeju Island – but it’s written in Jeju dialect. I’m going to break continuity here and tell you that although I’ve seen this episode several times, I don’t completely understand the references and clues in the poem. So in this recap, I’m just going to tell you where the clues lead the team.

Once the team deciphers the poem, they figure out that it leads a green tea farm. When they arrive, they see that each person must take a path through the field to open a chest on the other side. It’s kind of like a real life version of the ladder game that you might have seen in other variety shows.

As they cross the field one by one, they quickly discover that the contents of the chests can be shocking – quite literally in Kwangsoo‘s case, as his contains a pen that gives him a jolt when he presses it. Some chest go for the jump scare – Jongmin gets a balloon popped in his face, and Jaesuk is met with an explosion of whipped cream. And some chest are just plain unpleasant – Minyoung’s has little octopuses nestled in a bunch of mud, but Sehun takes the the spotlight when he reveals his contains two snakes. (Jaewook‘s doesn’t have anything in particular, so I guess he lucked out.)

Sejeong chooses a path that leads to a giant chest with a smaller locked one inside, and the team realizes that all of the other chests have compasses in them. Put together, the compasses can reveal the combination to the lock. There’s then a fair bit of fussing as they have to retrieve the compasses from the octopuses and the snakes, but the women roll up their sleeves and get the job done while Sehun hovers trying to be helpful and the rest of the men just freak out.

Hands down one of the most hilarious moments of the show – also, note that Jaewook ran so far away he ISN’T EVEN IN THE SHOT.

Upon successfully using the compass clues to unlock the chest, the team is rewarded with another poem verse… but they also discover a skeleton in the grass nearby. It appears he was murdered while searching for the treasure. (And it’s not the original owner of the treasure, because Woo Hyun said he died at sea.) At this point, two men abruptly appear on the scene. The middle-aged one introduces himself as journalist Joo Suro. Minyoung recognizes the younger man, Hong Jonghyun, as the handsome stranger she previously met – he says he’s from Seoul and it’s his first time in Jeju. Both men are interested in the treasure and join the hunt. Each one points out a potential treasure location from the new verse, and the team splits into two groups to follow those leads.

Jaesuk, Kwangsoo, and Minyoung accompany Suro to Maze Park (which is exactly like it sounds – a giant outdoor maze). They’re looking for a giant candle statue that was mentioned in the poem, but they are repeatedly hindered by groups of overexcited tourists running through the maze. When they do find the candle, they see a letter from another treasure hunter named Jeongsik. He writes that this treasure was a fake, but he found another good lead that is a “very important piece of information.” He instructs whomever this letter is intended for to meet him, because they are an accomplice too. *The plot thickens.*

Jaewook, Jongmin, Sehun, and Sejeong go with Jonghyun to a lighthouse, where Sehun and Jonghyun go diving to find the clue. They eventually locate a golden ball, and inside it is a letter to someone named Jeonghui. Unlike the other team, the original contents haven’t been messed with – it’s a message from the original owner of the treasure. When they return, a haenyeo (woman diver) on the pier seems to recognize Jonghyun. This makes him look very suspicious, because he said that he had never been to Jeju before.

The letter directs this group to Micheon Cave, which is one of one of several lava caves on Jeju Island. (I haven’t been to that particular one, but I’ve been to another and they are VERY cool.) They find a wish fulfillment tower surrounded by rows of random English letters, and some rows are missing letters. When the team walks in a circle, like in a wish fulfillment ceremony, the letters are supposed to reveal a pattern. That pattern should then reveal the combination for yet another locked item. Jaewook deduces that if you read one letter from each row as you go around, the letters spell out names of various countries. The last one is the password for the padlock: Korea. They get another poem verse and an address.

The puzzle at Micheon Cave.

Meanwhile, the group with Suro accompanies him to find Jeongsik… it turns out they know each other because they previously hunted for the treasure together. He takes them to Jeongsik’s house, but there’s no answer. Suro looks through a hole in the door and sees a body on the floor, so they pry the door open with a crowbar and find Jeongsik dead. There’s a rope hanging from the ceiling, rope marks around his neck, and a note on his computer that confessing to killing someone during a previous treasure hunt. Suro says pretty confidently that Jeongsik wouldn’t kill himself. According to him, Jeongsik did kill someone over an argument last year – that would be the skeleton they found in the green tea fields – and he was the one who tried to stop him. So the note Jeongsik left at Maze Park was intended for Suro, and Suro is the “accomplice” he referenced.

Umm… why is Suro friends with such a shady guy? And why did he spend a whole year keeping quiet about a MURDER? Unfortunately, this is never answered. But Jeongsik looks like a super shady guy, so I’m guessing he was blackmailing him or had some dirt on him or something like that.

The rope also seems to be too long for a suicide, so the group starts to think that it was murder. While searching the place, Minyoung finds a newspaper article about Woo Hyun denying charges of embezzlement. They also look through Jeongsik’s phone and recognize the last called phone number was Woo Hyun. He had previously given him his number and emphasized that they call him immediately when they located the treasure. Woo Hyun is also a fairly short man, and they had deduced that the killer was not tall. So, they start to suspect Woo Hyun of killing Jeongsik and then staging it to look like a suicide. They also solve the locked room murder aspect: the killer exited the house and locked it from the outside, then used a tape measure to slide the key back into Jeongsik’s bag through the hole in the door.

The two groups reunite at the final location and locate the final treasure chest. They become distraught when they realize don’t have a key for this one… but Jonghyun suddenly declares he might. His mother – Jeonghui – gave him her necklace when he died, and it turns out that’s the key. So Jonghyun is the son of the rich man. (And he apparently looks just like his dad did as a young man, which is why the haenyeo recognized him.) The chest contains a letter from the man confirming this, and leaving all his fortune to Jonghyun.

So… why didn’t the man just make a regular will to do this? Why did he instruct his friend to conduct a treasure hunt when there wasn’t any actual money and it all would have went to Jonghyun anyway? (Aside from the obvious answer that we wouldn’t have a story.) It seems like Jonghyun never met his father or knew what he looked like. So maybe the rich man laid it out that way in hopes of Jonghyun finding out about the treasure – maybe through his mother? – and coming to the island. But I’m not sure. Maybe I’m thinking about this too much.

The chest also contains a safe with Project D logo, and it’s locked with a combination they don’t have, which Jonghyun lets them keep. This is very important for later episodes.

The team deduces that Woo Hyun was the one who murdered Jeongsik, and they tell him about the treasure without letting on what they know. He instructs them to meet him at a gym to deliver the treasure, so they part with Suro and Jonghyun because they have served their narrative purposes. When they confront Woo Hyun, he confesses that he did kill Jeongsik because the guy was blackmailing him. I guess while Jeongsik was searching for the treasure, he figured out that it was meant to go to Jonghyun – which would be the “important piece of information” he wrote about to Suro. (He did have a picture of Jonghyun in his pocket and with notes connecting him to the haenyeo and the rich man.) And then he guessed that Woo Hyun was planning to steal the treasure to cover his debt, and called him to blackmail him with that.

So Woo Hyun confessed, and now the team can arrest him, right? Nope. Woo Hyun gleefully reveals that he planted a bomb in Kwangsoo’s backpack when he had taken it off at the museum. So it seems like he had probably been planning to use them and kill them anyway, and was just doubly motivated to do so when they found out about his other crimes. There’s only three minutes on the timer (of course), so the team scrambles to cut the wires in the correct order – the solution is the the colors of the wires match the tea cups that he gave them earlier that morning, and the order is the order they were standing in. They solve it with three seconds to go, and then catch Woo Hyun because he stayed to watch them get blown up. In a moment of dark humor, he tells them that it was a fake bomb… except they activate it just to see, and it is DEFINITELY not. Geez, what a sadistic man.

Once everything is settled, the team receives a video message from K. He tells them that the owner of the treasure was actually the man who financed Project D, and the safe contains something important… but we won’t find out what it is until much later. He tells them they’ve earned some time to relax on the island, but warns that they need to stay vigilant… because enemies of the project might try to hurt them.

Which takes us to a preview for next episode: Kwangsoo wakes up covered in blood and finds a dead woman in his room. Yikes!

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NOTE: All photos and GIFs are screenshots or screen captures from Busted! Episode 2 on Netflix. Nothing belongs to me, and all images are used here for illustrative purposes only.